Kiese Laymon's debut novel is an exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that's alternately funny, lacerating, and wise. The book contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he's sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called "Long Division." He learns that one of the book's main characters is also named City Coldson--but "Long Division" is set in 1985. This 1985 City, along with his friend and love-object, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet protect his family from the Klan.

City's two stories ultimately converge in the mysterious work shed behind his grandmother's, where he discovers the key to Baize's disappearance.

"With Long Division, Laymon gives us a story that embodies the ellipsis, the idea of an understood but unspoken beginning and ending. Narratives very rarely end; they go through edits and revisions. Characters are added and erased. For a book that begins with a grammar and language competition,Long Division fittingly ends with a statement about language, and that statement is that language, like history, never stops moving forward." -Los Angeles Review of Books

Novelist, professor, and social commentator , called Long Division "[an] ambitious novel, and though it is raw and flawed, it is the most exciting book I’ve read all year. There’s nothing like it, both in terms of the scope of what the book tackles and the writing’s Afro Surrealist energy." -Roxane Gay, author of Hungry

"In a multilayered, allusion-packed, time-traveling plot set in Mississippi, Long Division takes us, nesting-doll-style, from 2013 to 1985, 1964, and back, engaging complex questions of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to history. More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isn’t, either, entirely past." -The Boston Review

"Long Divisionfinally gave me what I’ve wanted to see in contemporary southern literature. For years I’ve complained about no recent accounts of black southerners in American Literature. It goes down in southern rap – which we’ll get to in the following paragraphs – but in literary studies it’s always been the old guard: Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Alice Walker (I swear, if I read “Everyday Use” in one more class I’d quit life). Long Division basically told me “sit down and shut the hell up. Here it is. Here’s what you wanted.” -Regina Bradley, author of Outkasted Conversations

"Long Division is a serious book about race and love with a thread of humor running through it, emerging largely from Laymon's wordplay and the cultural gaps that exist between characters from the past, present and future. With roots in Southern and African American literature, Long Division is an historical novel that touches on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a work of magical realism in the tradtion of Haruki Murakami, an influence to which Laymon overtly tips his hat with the slightly disruptive presence of a talking cat." -Contemporary Literature

"As if anything could be beyond what Laymon has done for race, temporality, geography, and the South—as well as for the real and transhistorical black southerner—there is also what Long Division does for questions of love, death, and dying. Across cities/Cities, there is the looming and encompassing quality of love that bends sexuality and familial boundaries." -Zandria Robinson, author of This Ain't Chicago

"Long Division is one of those books that I picked up and just couldn’t stop reading...powerful, a classic American novel." -Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop

"Kiese Laymon is an amazing, courageous and brave novelist and essayist.... Laymon fiercely tackles issues of prejudice, adolescence and love with a swagger and confidence all his own. You rarely find novels this honest and engaging. Read this book." -Michigan Quarterly Review

“Laymon is a brilliant young writer...this is a book that sings in the heart but challenges readers to take careful consideration of the power of memory. Like the best of Hurston, Ellison, or Bambara, Laymon’s craft flows on frequencies that both honor and extend the traditions those writers established.” —William Henry Lewis, author of I Got Somebody in Staunton

"Laymon’s debut novel is bursting with colloquial language from three generations of Mississippi African Americans, mixed with gut-piercing truths about a long racial divide that persists to this day." —School Library Journal

"Laymon’s debut novel is…rich and labyrinthine, populated with complex characters. [It] elegantly showcases Laymon’s command of voice and storytelling skill in a tale that is at once dreamlike and concrete, personal and political." —Booklist

"Don’t miss Kiese Laymon’s Long Division. One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades. The sharp humor and deep humanity make this debut novel unforgettable." —Melissa Harris-Perry

"A novel within a novel—hilarious, moving and occasionally dizzying.... Laymon cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways. Laymon moves us dazzlingly (and sometimes bewilderingly) from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice, confusion and love rooted in an emphatically post-Katrina world." —Kirkus Reviews

“Smart, exciting and energetic...the language romps and roars along through some truly wonderful comic scenes and yet the book doesn’t hesitate to comment seriously on questions that matter to human beings everywhere, not just in rural Mississippi.” —Victor LaValle

"Laymon’s voice is unique, a rarity in an era during which fiction tends all too often to chase trends.... At times touching, at times poignant, Laymon more than once strikes a beautiful chord in the midst of what often feels gritty and intentionally provocative. Those touching insights make Long Division worth the effort, and readers who stick with the story (stories, actually) will find themselves thinking about City and the people in his life long after they close the book." —Chicago Book Review

“The racial/ethical awareness is as complex as Coetzee’s, and Laymon is just as good a writer. Laymon takes some real risks. I love the interplay of spirituality and sexuality. Nothing sounds forced, pandering or trendy. City, the husky citizen of the imagination, feels totally singular and totally representative. That’s tough to pull off.” —Tim Strode, author of Ethics of Exile